| The story of this study's origins is worth repeating. It was like a scene from The Graduate, only instead of a pool party it was a Tuesday night poker game. My friend Burt Dietch, whom I've known since Mrs. McQueeney's fourth grade class at Roger Sherman School in New Haven, knowing that I was finishing up my book on Grace Paley and undecided about what the next project would be, said, "I have one word for you: BATBOY." |
| That word was father to much thought, grandfather to research, progenitor of the project. I discovered that no one had tapped the enormous resource of baseball lore and legend in the memory banks of former batboys, that fears about the difficulty of accessing sources were groundless, and that the subculture of clubhouse and dugout has its own rites and myths and charm. |
| Everyone I talked to about the project seemed to know someone who had been a batboy, and every one of them I tracked down knew two or three others. I did my usual backgrounding in the Library of Congress, wrote a hundred letters, made a thousand phone calls, prowled stadiums long hours before game time, drove a few tough interview subjects to Atlantic City after a Phillies game, and in Detroit, against the advice of security people, walked out Michigan Avenue to the corner of Wabash where someone thought Eddie Forester, who had batboyed for Ty Cobb, still lived. |
| Why hadn't anyone thought of it before, I was asked over and over again, and what can we do to help? With few exceptions, the former batboys of every era were receptive. As the appendix makes clear, some chose to write me, some to tape-record their own reminiscences, some to be interviewed by phone, and some to welcome personal visits. Many followed up with additional installments. Of the exceptions, there were a couple of Californians who feared I |
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